Sunday, December 31, 2017

Well,
it’s a week after Christmas Eve, a week since the miracle of Love coming down
to us. That miracle is just the start,
of course; in the Gospel stories about Jesus, we hear about lots of miracles. In fact, we hear about miracles so often that
they almost seem commonplace. “Blah,
blah, blah; the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the dead are raised;
blah, blah, blah….”

But
what we don’t hear is what the
formerly blind man or the healed woman is doing a week later. My guess is that, after those miracles, the people
involved were still trying to process it all, trying to make sense of some
incredible thing that had happened. They
probably looked back to the stories of their tradition to help them understand why
and how God had healed them. And they
probably asked the question, “OK, God – now what am I supposed to do?”

That’s
what we’re doing here this morning, too.
Last Sunday and Monday, we heard about astounding things. A virgin gave birth to a king, “and of his
kingdom there will be no end” (Luke 1:33).
Angels appeared to a bunch of frightened shepherds, singing God’s
praises and telling them God’s anointed king was lying in a feed box in a dirty
stable. Just as amazing, the shepherds went
to Bethlehem and found the baby just as the angels said. The Son of God has come into our world to save
us.

So,
last Sunday was the time for praise and awe; today is the day for theological
reflection. And to help us with that,
we’re given the prologue to the Gospel of John.
Though it may not have sounded like it, the Gospel reading this morning
is John’s version of the Christmas story.
John never mentions the baby or the shepherds or the kings or a virgin
giving birth. Instead, John begins his
story long before that: “In the beginning” – back to the Book of Genesis, the
book of beginnings.

“In
the beginning was the Word,” John says.
Not the written word, not the books of Scripture that we read, but the Word, the Logos, the power through
which God created the universe and holds it in order. All things came into being through this Word
of God; and without it, life simply would not be. When God said, “Let there be light,” (Genesis
1:3), it was the Word of God that brought the light of life to the
universe. Without the Word, darkness
would overcome the light every time.

And
this divine Word through which God creates and recreates everything “became
flesh and lived among us,” John says (1:14).
It’s like imagining all the power and light and heat of our sun being
bottled up in a single light bulb. In
that one baby in the manger, in that one man teaching and healing in the
villages of Galilee, John says we have seen the glory of God’s creative Word,
“the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth” (1:14). “No one has ever seen God,” John admits. But this human being, who seems so normal at
first glance, this human being “is God the only Son, who is close to the
Father’s heart [and] who has made [God] known” to us (1:18).

So,
in the clear light of the week after Christmas, we can see a little better just
who this miracle baby really is. But
that’s not all. John takes it one step further
and answers the question that has to come eventually for anyone who considers
actually believing the Christmas story.
And that question is this: So what?
OK, maybe the Word of God has
come to take flesh and dwell in the world.
Maybe this baby is exactly who
John says he is. But what difference
does that make? What’s in it for me?

In a
nutshell, here’s the difference it makes: It means salvation. And that means completehealing. It means a second chance to be who we were
created to be in the first place, when God made us in God’s own image. We turn away from that and reject the
identity God has in mind for us. We turn
to ourselves and our own desires, even to the extent that when this true light
of God came into the world in Jesus, “the world did not know him. He came to what was his own,” John says, “and
his own people did not accept him.” (1:10-11)

And so
it is with us. We see the light of God
breaking into the darkness around us, and we hear the Word of God calling out
to us; but too often we choose emptiness of our own making. We seek the happiness of the moment. We measure our value by how we look or how
perfect our lives seem. We grow up
damaged by our childhoods, having watched the people we love hurt themselves
and each other, and we swear we’ll never be like them. But then we live out the pathologies we’ve
learned anyway, and we add to them a new one – the pathology of shame as we see
the ways we fall short, too.

But
because of that baby in the manger, because the Word of God became flesh and
dwelled among us, saying “no” to God doesn’t have to be our final answer. Every year at this season, we get another
chance to open ourselves up and let the Word of God take flesh in us. To all who receive him, John says, to all who
believe in his name, Jesus gives power to become children of God, to be reborn
not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of people, but reborn of
God (1:12-13). The Word became flesh and
dwelt among us so that we could see what we were missing – and choose that instead.

Years
ago, I saw a church sign at Christmastime that read, “Remember: It’s Jesus’
birthday, not yours.” In a sense, of
course, that sign was dead on. We need
to hear the call to get over ourselves and remember that Christmas isn’t about
how many presents we get. But in another
sense, that sign missed something important, because Christmas actually is about us. This celebration of Jesus’ birth is also a celebration
of our rebirth as the creatures God intended us to be: God’s children and heirs
of eternal life. Here’s how Paul puts it
in the reading from Galatians this morning: “When the fullness of time had
come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, … so that we might receive adoption as
[God’s] children [and receive] the Spirit of his Son into our hearts…” (Galatians
4:4-6). When we bring Jesus into our
hearts and into our lives, when let the Lord actually govern us, then God
breathes new life into us, filling us with the Spirit we were made to
enflesh.

And
as we stand here at the threshold of a new year, we have the perfect
opportunity to put that new life into action.
It’s resolution time. Now, I know
resolutions are notoriously hard to keep, and I am just as guilty as anyone
else of resolving to work out or lose weight and then losing my resolve after a
couple of weeks (or less) – and then feeling worse about myself than I did
before. But this year, I’m taking a
different approach. I’m committing to ride
an exercise bike. That doesn’t sound
much different than most resolutions, but here’s where I think the difference
lies. I’m not just doing this because I think
I “should.” I’m doing it as a thank-you
gift to God for the new life of love I’ve been given, for being God’s child
redeemed by Love itself.

So, here’s
my New Year’s wish for you: that your resolutions might not hang over you with
the weight of unfulfilled promises, but that they might serve as offerings to
God in thanksgiving for who you are – a beloved child giving a gift of
gratitude to the parent who loves you more than you can imagine. In this new year, may you live boldly as God’s
new creation, and may the true light that enlightens the world flash like fire
from your eyes.

Sunday, December 24, 2017

This is a night of crazy love. In the midst of everything else you have on
your heart and mind tonight, I’d ask you to stop for a moment and consider whether
this makes any sense at all: In a
particular historical moment, specifically while some guy named Quirinius was
governor of Syria, the Creator and Sovereign of the Universe decided it was a
good idea to experience being human in order to save humans from the powers of
sin and death that beat us down. And not
just that: The Creator and Sovereign of
the Universe decided the best way to do that was to be born to an unwed teenaged
peasant oppressed by a foreign empire, in a day when medical infrastructure
looked like pieces of cloth wrapped around a baby screaming in a barn. This is how the Creator and Sovereign of the
Universe decided to experience human life in order to save us: from the bottom
up, from the inside out. The theologians
call it the doctrine of the Incarnation, but I call it crazy love – love that
bends our minds even as we come here tonight to bend our knees.

I’ve had some glimpses of crazy love in my
life. Mostly, they’ve come from my
parents. My parents are older now and
slowing down, but what I remember is love they drew from a well whose depth I
can only hope to fathom. My mother
raised four kids, working as a teacher through several of those years; yet what
I remember is her presence – reading to me every night, playing games, taking
me to the library or the zoo, encouraging me to ask questions and explore. My father was a university dean, doing the
thankless work of administration with such taxing honor that his colleagues
gave him the nickname, “Spike the Just.”
Yet, I remember him being there with me when he came home from work,
playing catch in the backyard. On a wall
in my house is a fading photo from about 1970 of my father and me sitting at a
campfire we’d built on a cold Colorado morning, warming our hands in mirror
image and grinning the same grin that says, life doesn’t get any better than
this. In every way imaginable, my
parents have given themselves to the four of us kids, then and now. Being their child has been like living the
last scene of the movie It’s a Wonderful
Life. And when I’ve told them how I
feel incapable of ever paying them back, they say, of course, that’s not the
point. The point is to pay it forward
with my kids … and with the world around me.
It’s crazy love, accounting that only makes sense in God’s economy.

Here’s what I’ve learned from my parents: Their unconditional love is a glimpse, a
sacrament, of God’s unconditional
love. And what that means, as hard as it
is to say it out loud, is that I hold immeasurable value in God’s eyes. There is nothing and no one that matters more
to God; nothing and no one that stirs God’s heart more deeply. And the same is true for you. I don’t care who you are, or what you’ve done,
or what you haven’t done – it is the
truth, the fundamental truth of this
holy night, that God loves you immeasurably.
Like any parent, God’s disappointed in
you sometimes. God’s heart may even ache
tonight, wishing to see you coming down the road back home. But God never gives up on you. And you never cease being worth all that
crazy love.

And you know, the same is true about the
person sitting next to you. And the
person sitting down the pew. And the
person sitting on the couch back home. And
the person sitting at an empty bar, with no one to go home to. And the person sleeping on the street,
freezing tonight. And the person lying
in an Alzheimer’s unit. And the person running
away from the cops. And the person crying
because she can’t afford to buy her daughter a Christmas present. God loves each of them a million times more
than my parents love me.

That is the gift of Christmas: love you
can never earn, and love you can never repay.
All you can do is love someone else in return.

Deep down, we all know that. But what does that love look like?

Our cherished images of Christmas tell us
the story, like Christmas cards hanging on the doorways of our lives. Think about A Christmas Carol, with Ebenezer Scrooge seeing the emptiness of
his life, receiving the gift of a second chance, and finally sending the prize
turkey to Tiny Tim and his family. Think
about It’s a Wonderful Life, with the
self-sacrificing George Bailey wanting to kill himself for a life insurance payout
but finding his friends rallying around, and showering him with love, and showing him he’s the richest man in town. You know the story, told a hundred ways: Life shortchanges you, or you shortchange others. You feel your heart held captive, and you start
to lose hope. You can’t even see what
redemption looks like, and you can’t imagine it coming to you. And then God acts.

In the great, cosmic story of redemption
we hear tonight, God announces divine action through angels visiting shepherds,
with the whole host of the heavenly army turned into a glee club, stepping
aside from the battle against sin and death to let a tiny child do the work
instead. And in that child, God comes as
the true emperor, the one to show that Caesar is a cheap fraud, the one to free
us from the power of evil and sin and death, vanquishing those powers at Easter. But God does it in the last way anyone would’ve
guessed. In the words of the ancient
carol we’ll hear in a few minutes, “This little babe so few days old is come to
rifle Satan’s fold; / All hell doth at his presence quake, though he himself
for cold [doth] shake.” In the deep
mystery of love, God sends a little child to do a conqueror’s work.

Though it’s crazy, it’s a pattern of love
we can trust and from which God calls us to act. Love is what changes the world. Love is what frees us from the disfigured
shadows of ourselves that life can turn us into. Love is what changes the heart of Ebenezer
Scrooge, and warms the heart of George Bailey, to live into the fullness of
whom God’s created them to be. Love
comes from people we don’t expect to see, in places we don’t expect to find
them, to fill holes in our hearts we never knew were there.

That happened to me at the Free Store this
Wednesday – and I imagine most of us who went there to give out clothes and talk
to clients could tell our own story of unexpected love that came down that
day. One of our volunteers introduced me
to a client. The man looked at me and
asked, “Can I trust you?” And I said, “Well,
if you can’t, I might as well just go on home now because trust is pretty much
all I’ve got to work with.” So the
client replied, “I have a little feedback about this project, for you to
consider for next year.” And I thought,
“OK, what did we do wrong…?” But the man
said, “Everything here is great, and I really appreciate it. But next year, put out an offering box so we can help out, so we can give
back.” Then he handed me six dollars and
said, “Here. Use this as your first donation
toward next year.”

That is God’s crazy love, a divine mystery
we come to know best through flesh and bones.
Through people no better than ourselves.
Through the divine mystery of Incarnation: that the very essence of
God’s being, love itself, comes to dwell among us and within us, stirring our
stiff hearts to remember, form deep within our divine DNA, that we were created
by Love for love. In fact, the
instrument of choice for accomplishing God’s grandest and most eternal purpose
is … you. Just as God comes into the
world as a baby shivering in the cold, so God comes to you tonight, aching to
be born anew. And in your mundane flesh
and bones, in your sometimes cold, cold heart, the Word takes flesh and dwells
among us once again.

My parents were right. I can never pay them back. I can never return the love they’ve given
me. But I can take that love and show up
for someone else, thousands of times over.
None of us can fix the world, but we can love it, one child of God at a
time. We can show up when someone is
sick. We can stay in relationship when
our selfish hearts tell us to run. We
can show our children what it looks like to love, no matter what. We can talk to a stranger who lives on the
street. We can get to know someone God brings
into this church. We can follow God’s
lead, on this holy night, and love the world precisely as we find it, one
broken person at a time. As crazy as it
sounds, that’s how Love saves the world today.
God wants nothing more than to share your life, and shape your heart,
and take your flesh, and be born tonight, in you.

Sunday, December 10, 2017

On Monday, I drove to Springfield to see
my parents. The day began in some
anxiety. I felt like I needed to go see my parents, that this
was an important time for me to show up, not just talk on the phone. At the same time, nine hours of driving and
chatting and driving some more was a lot of time to be spending at a pretty
busy season of the year … to say nothing about all the e-mails I haven’t been
returning in any kind of timely way. But
I needed to take a road trip, so off I went.

Actually, I like driving. I like having the space to listen to NPR and
take in the wide-open countryside. There
are days when my perspective becomes pretty small, I’m afraid – only looking a
couple of feet in front of me at a computer screen or a few more feet across
the table at the other folks in that hour’s meeting. It was good to look out farther, into the open
space of late-autumn-into-winter, across the west Missouri countryside.

It was a dark day, as so many days are
this time of year. Clouds hung low in
striations of slightly different shades of gray. Bare trees poked into the gray; naked
branches reaching up like black capillaries, the trees’ darkness broken only by
a few ghostly gray trunks of sycamores among the oaks and hickory. The ground added a little contrast – fields
of short, light-brown grass, with slightly darker brown prairie grasses waving
in the wind above it. It all looked like
an Andrew Wyeth painting, and just as cheery.

Though you’re never more than a few miles
from a gas station and convenience store on this route, it was easy to imagine
the landscape around me as wilderness.
Wilderness looks different in different geographies – sometimes dense
forest, sometimes rugged hills, sometimes barren desert. For me, the wilderness was west Missouri in
early December, rolling by outside my car.

There’s something about the wilderness. Sometimes it calls to us; sometimes it scares
us to death. But always it’s potent – a
place of revelation, if we’re willing to let God be revealed.

A couple of our readings for this second
Sunday of Advent take us to the wilderness.
There, in the windswept desert landscape of Judea, with rocks and dust
all around and just a meager stream running through it, we come upon John the
Baptist. He’s there to “prepare the way
of the Lord [and] make his paths straight” (Mark 1:3). He calls God’s people to “a baptism of repentance
for the forgiveness of sins,” and “people from the whole Judean countryside and
… Jerusalem were going out to him … confessing their sins” and marking their
repentance with a rebirth in the River Jordan (Mark 1:4-5). Hearing this story may seem like an odd way
to prepare for Christmas. Here we are – shopping,
trimming the tree, going to parties, minding our holiday business – and we run
smack into a prophet dressed in camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his
waist like the prophet Elijah from Israel’s history, eating locusts and wild
honey rather than smoked salmon and Christmas cookies. John the Baptist and his wilderness can certainly
get in our way this time of year, like a drive through the west Missouri
countryside we don’t have time for.

But God puts John the Baptist into Advent
for a reason, of course. He is indeed
preparing the way for the coming of the Messiah in the Gospel story, with John
acting in Elijah’s role to signal the beginning of the end of the age. But John the Baptist is out there in the
wilderness for each one of us, too – waiting for us. There’s something to the fact that John the
Baptist sets up shop out in the desert, away from busy Jerusalem, away from the
demands of every day. John the Baptist
doesn’t come knocking on our doors, delivering introspection and repentance
like an Amazon box, left for our convenience.
Instead, John the Baptist makes people come out to the wilderness to
find him. And the amazing thing is, they go – “all the
people of Jerusalem,” the Gospel writer says.
Sure, it’s hyperbole, but it makes the point: Even the busy people of Jerusalem knew they
needed a road trip to the wilderness.

And what happens there? Is there something mystical and magical about
the wilderness that lets us find God in a way we typically can’t? You hear people talking and writing that way
sometimes, and we might hear it in today’s Gospel story, too – all those
people, heading to the wilderness in search of God. But I don’t think that’s how it works. At least that’s not how it works for me. In the Andrew Wyeth landscape of a December
west Missouri, God didn’t make some dramatic personal appearance.

So, what is it about the wilderness
then? Why do our Scriptures and our
hearts take us there? I think the first
reading this morning gives us the clue. Because
in Isaiah’s poetry, we don’t hear about the people entering the wilderness to
find God. We hear about God entering the
wilderness to find God’s people. In this
reading’s historical moment, the people of Israel are in exile, held captive in
Babylon after erring and straying from God’s ways like lost sheep over the
centuries. But now the time has come,
says a voice from heaven. “Comfort, O
comfort my people,” the heavenly messenger tells the prophet. “In the wilderness, prepare the way of the
Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” (Isaiah 40:1,3) The mountains shall be plowed down, and the
rocky valleys shall be filled, and God will come across the desert toward Babylon
to lead the captive people back home.
“The Lord God comes with might” to “gather the lambs in his arms” and
set them free, the prophet says (Isaiah 40:10-11). The people aren’t heading to the wilderness
to find a God they’ve lost. God heads
into the wilderness to find the people God loves and longs for.

But the irony is that the people had to
lose something they held tightly before they could receive the healing return
that God wanted to offer them. It took
the loss of their freedom and control during 50 years in exile before the
people were ready to hear that they had served their term and their penalty was
paid. They had to lose the illusion of
self-sufficiency, the conceit that they knew best, in order to make space for
God to act. And once they let it go, God
came to bring them home.

I don’t know what you may need to lose
this Advent, what you might be clinging to, but I’ll bet there’s something God’s
asking you to let the River Jordan wash away.
For me, I think it might have to do with wanting to see things fit together
neatly, wanting to see my work all sewn up.
I remember, three years ago, talking with a priest in Manchester,
England, on my sabbatical, the Rev. Nick Bundock. Nick and I were having lunch at a lovely spot
in his church’s neighborhood, which reminded me so much of Brookside it was a
little eerie. We were talking about the
challenges of parish ministry, and how to engage with people in the
neighborhoods around our churches, and how to deal with impossible expectations
… in other words, how to do this work faithfully. Nick said, “You know, I spent a long time
thinking my call was to sort things out for God. God would show me some problem or challenge,
and I would think, ‘I’ll take that on; let me manage that one for you.’ I think I’m finally realizing,” Nick said,
“that God isn’t asking me to sort everything out. God’s asking me to be there and help while he takes care of it.” I felt like I was looking into a mirror
across that lunch table. But three years
later, I’m still guilty of thinking I’m supposed to sort out the mess for God
rather than working with God to love people through it.

That’s probably what I need to take to the
River Jordan this Advent. That’s
probably the wilderness I need to open up for God to enter. Because, like I said, it’s not so much about us
going to the wilderness to find God; it’s about us inviting God into the
wilderness we ourselves carry. It’s
about us preparing the way of the Lord in our own hearts and souls, making the
rough places a plain so that the glory of the Lord may be revealed within them.

So, where’s your wilderness? Finding it is not necessarily an easy
journey, and my hunch is that you don’t have time to take it. But this Advent, go ahead and take a road
trip to find your wilderness. Give
yourself the early Christmas gift of looking honestly at your life and asking yourself,
“Where do I need healing? Where do I
need grace? Where am I trying too
hard? Where am I too scared to try hard
enough? What am I hanging onto so
tightly that I can’t open my arms to the Lord who’s waiting there to embrace
me?”

My guess is that, once you find your
wilderness, the King shall come precisely within it. As I left Springfield on Monday afternoon,
the darkness of the day was just as deep as it had been that morning. The browns and grays were all still there,
the trees standing lifeless and the fields painted dirty beige. Or, at least they were until the clouds gave
way for a few moments. And as they did,
the Son repainted the scene. The edges
of the gray clouds were lit with pink and purple; and the dirty beige fields
blazed gold; and the darker beige prairie grass blazed orange; and the sickly
gray sycamore trunks shone silvery white.
And in the wilderness, the glory of the Lord was revealed.

Sunday, November 26, 2017

Here’s your bit of Bible trivia for this
St. Andrew’s Sunday: Scripture gives us not one but two stories about how Andrew
met Jesus and what Andrew did as a result. It’s something I love about
Scripture, actually – that these two stories conflict with each other, and yet,
there they are, right alongside one another in the Bible.

One is the story we just heard, from
Matthew (and it’s in Mark’s Gospel, too). Jesus has been baptized and anointed
with the Holy Spirit, and he’s spent 40 days in the wilderness struggling with
Satan. Now he’s begun his public ministry, proclaiming, “Repent, for the
kingdom of heaven has come near” (4:17). And as he walks by the Sea of Galilee,
he sees a couple of brothers, Peter and Andrew, out fishing. Now, these guys must
have heard Jesus preaching earlier, because they aren’t zombies, just following
anyone who tells them to. But when Jesus makes the invitation, he sets the hook
in these fishermen: “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people” (4:19). And
“immediately, they left their nets” and began to follow him (4:20).

So that’s the story we heard today. The
other version of this event comes from the Gospel of John. Again, John the
Baptist is there, naming Jesus as God’s anointed. And again, soon afterward,
Jesus is walking by, and two of John the Baptist’s disciples set out to follow
Jesus instead. One of these two was Andrew; the other isn’t named. They ask
Jesus what he’s doing and where he’s going, and Jesus just looks back at them
and says, “Come and see” (1:39). So, they do, and they spend the day in the
presence of the Son of God himself. When that amazing day is over, Andrew runs home
to share what’s happened with the person he’s closest to, his brother, Peter;
and he says to Peter, “We have found the Messiah!” (1:41). This is why, through
Christian tradition, Andrew is remembered, first and foremost, for bringing the
renowned St. Peter on board. And it’s why, in our windows over the altar, we
see Andrew to Jesus’ right and Peter to Jesus’ left – a little editorializing
about pride of place for the guy, as the collect this morning puts it, whose
claim to fame is that he “brought his brother with him” (BCP 237).

Of course, after the Gospel stories,
Andrew didn’t just fall off the map. In fact, depending on which traditions you
want to believe, he went all over the map. Different traditions say Andrew
brought Jesus’ good news to Ethiopia, or to Ukraine, or to Russia,
or to Greece, where he was martyred on an X-shaped cross. Even in death, Andrew
was still on the move as his remains were reportedly taken to Scotland, which
is why he became Scotland’s patron saint. And that explains why a bunch of
people in Kansas City are wearing tartans and listening to bagpipes as they
celebrate this day that honors a Palestinian fisherman.

So, other than giving us a chance to enjoy
pipes and drums and tartan, what does all this mean for us? Where are we in these
two stories of St. Andrew?

I think both stories of Andrew’s call
matter for us because they call us along two different dimensions of our journey
as Christians: to be disciples and to be apostles, to put down our fishing nets
to follow Jesus and to bring someone along
with us. God has created us for both aspects of our calling, for discipleship
and apostleship – wired us to follow and wired us to invite. That’s not just
true about religion but about all of our life in community. When someone or
something offers us compelling answers, we’re more than happy to be led out of
our darkness and into the light. And when we find that those answers work for
us – whether to lose weight, or grow our portfolios, or find a like-minded
community – when the answers work for us, we’re very happy to invite others to
come with us, and see.

Next Sunday is the first Sunday of Advent,
as well as the official conclusion of our season of stewardship. We’ll gather
the pledges we’ve received so far and bless them as a foretaste of all that we’ll
receive – pledges of money, certainly, but also pledges of time and talent
through the parish survey we recently sent out. And because next week is the
first Sunday of Advent, it will also be New Year’s Day, at least as far as the Church
calendar is concerned. We’ll start a new cycle of Sunday readings and begin our
season of spiritual new beginnings, the time when we prepare ourselves to
receive the gift of Emmanuel at Christmas – God-With-Us to dwell in the dirty stables
and hang on the crosses of our own lives, sharing everything we live and know and giving us eternal life anyway. It’s
a great time for resolutions, as we prepare our hearts to receive our Savior.

So, with the stewardship season winding
down and the Church’s new year on the horizon, here’s your call, as a spiritual
descendant of St. Andrew. Here’s your call, as a steward of all the amazing
gifts God’s given you. Here’s your call, as someone stepping into Advent’s
preparation for God to be with you, at your side and in your heart. Your call
is nothing less than Andrew’s call: to be both a disciple and an apostle. Your
call is to follow Jesus – as Paul’s letter to the Romans reminds us very
directly, “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your
heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (10:9). And, your
call is to invite others along on your journey. As Paul also puts it in Romans,
“How are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they
to hear without someone to proclaim him? And how are they to proclaim him
unless they are sent?” (10:14-15) Our call is Andrew’s call, from both of his
stories: To leave our nets and follow, and to bring someone along with us.

Now, when I hear someone say something
like that, what comes to mind for me are all the reasons why I think I can’t do
it. I’m not good enough to consider the Lord of the universe my friend and
companion. I’m not really willing to give up everything to become all religious
and lose the things I love about normal life. I’m not compelling enough to
bring someone with me to some churchy event … and on any given Sunday, I’m not
sure what I think about every word we pray in worship anyway.

If you identify with any of those feelings,
I think you’re in good company. But here’s the thing. First, you are good enough – God says so. Second, you
don’t have to become a nun or a monk or some crazy church person who wears
crosses and Bible verses on your t-shirt. And third, you are the most compelling witness the world has ever known.

It’s that last one that makes you stop
short, right? How can that be? Well, it’s all about context, and opportunity,
and relationship. Here’s what I mean. St. Peter was St. Peter, for God’s sake. He healed people with only a word; he converted
thousands by preaching Jesus’ resurrection; he did all that despite his own
religious leaders’ attempts to silence him with beatings and imprisonments; he
ended up dying a martyr’s death in Rome. Talk about a disciple and an apostle! A
person like that would never have
listed to me.

Well, probably not – unless, of course, I also
happened to be his brother. Andrew didn’t quote Bible verses at Peter, or preach
some inspiring sermon to him, or write a theological treatise to teach him the
mysteries of God. Andrew simply brought his brother with him to experience
something Andrew found compelling on his own journey. Andrew could make the ask
because he had the relationship that
counted.

So, on this St. Andrew’s Sunday, let me give
you this challenge: Ask yourself, what do I find compelling about this journey
of relationship with God, and who might I invite into it? There is no single
answer to that question; in fact, there are scores of answers to that question.
I know of a parishioner who recently started a new AA group that meets here,
and its attendance doubled in the first few weeks. I know of a men’s group that
had a conversation, over Bible study and beer, about who they might invite to
come and join them. I know of a music program that offers prayer and praise,
both Sunday mornings and two evenings a month, rivaling the best vocal music in
the city. I know of outreach ministries that bring healing to people in our
community and change lives for more than 400 kids at a school in rural Haiti. I
know of a partnership with the Roasterie that’s providing our own St. Andrew’s
Blend coffee, which we’ll enjoy on Sunday mornings here and which we’ll serve
in the new HJ’s youth and community center rising up across the street. I know,
and see, people before me here today who find some of their life’s best and
deepest relationships through this family of St. Andrew’s, reveling together in
times of joy and holding each other up in times of pain. There’s a lot that’s
compelling about this journey with God that we’re taking together. And some
piece of it would be authentic for you to offer as a way to invite someone else
to come along, too.

You don’t have to give up your life entirely. You
don’t have to become a street-corner preacher. God isn’t asking us to take
ourselves out of the world we know. Instead, God’s asking us to connect the
world we know with the kingdom Christ calls us to see coming near. Just interrupt
your fishing long enough to get to know this Jesus we’re following. Just make
an invitation to someone you know to come along and experience something that
feeds you. Just leave your nets, at least for a while, and bring someone with
you. Because, for someone out there, you
are the most compelling witness the world has ever known.

Saturday, November 25, 2017

You’ve probably heard the claim that
anyone can become an expert at something by practicing it for 10,000 hours. Now, apparently other experts say that isn’t
exactly true, that all the practice in the world isn’t going to let me nail a base
stealer at second like Salvador Perez does.
Fair enough. But still, all that
practice is certainly going to sharpen your skills. If you practice a foreign language for 10,000 hours,
you can become pretty proficient in it.
If you make 10,000 fancy meals, you can become a pretty fine chef. Practice may not make us perfect, but practice
does make us different. Practice changes
us, forming us for good … or for ill.

So, this is Thanksgiving, not just our
national day of eating and self-reflection but also a feast on the Episcopal Church
calendar. It seems this isn’t just a
historical remnant of Abraham Lincoln’s gratitude for Union victories, nor a
sanctified day of overindulgence, nor the calm before the storm of Black Friday,
our national feast of consumerism. This
is Thanksgiving, when our readings, at least, call us to pause, to marvel at
all that we’ve been given, and to reflect on where it all comes from.

It seems we humans have a deep need for this
kind of reorientation, given that Moses’ admonitions to the people of Israel
ring perfectly true to us 3,000 years later.
Standing before the Israelites as they’re about to cross over the Jordan
into the Promised Land, Moses gives his valedictory address, his last chance to
guide the people as his own life is ending.
Moses paints a lavish picture of the abundance they’re about to
receive. He says, the Lord is bringing you
into a land of flowing streams, wheat and barley, grapes and figs, pomegranates
and olives, iron and copper; “a land where you may eat bread without scarcity,
where you will lack nothing.” (Deuteronomy 8:7-10). Interestingly, the Europeans who came to
these shores saw this land of the New World in similar terms and, on their best
days, blessed God for it … even as they also took it away from the people they
met … again, like the Israelites.

Anyway, Moses’ point isn’t just that the
people’s time in the wilderness is over.
His point is the responsibility that comes along with such astonishing
blessing. “When you have eaten your fill
and have built fine houses and live in them,” Moses says, “…then do not exalt
yourself, forgetting the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of
Egypt, out of the house of slavery…. Do
not say to yourself, ‘My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this
wealth.’ But remember the Lord your God,
for it is he who gives you power to get wealth….” (Deuteronomy 8:12-18) And when you remember, Moses says, let that
memory guide you into the practice of faithfulness: “[K]eep [God’s] commandments, his ordinances,
and his statutes…,” Moses says (8:11).
Remember, and follow God’s ways.
Remember, and live by God’s love.

So, this is Thanksgiving, here to remind
us of the same truth Moses saw: Our blessings are not our own. Our blessings are on loan to us from God, and
God expects us to pass them along, to steward the incredible abundance we
receive and then share it, both with the people around us today and with the
future yet unborn.

What do we need to do in order to be
formed into those people God longs for us to be? What does Jesus ask of the lepers whom he
heals, bringing them out of the darkness of exclusion and into the blessing of
relationship? He asks them, simply, to
say thank you.

It’s no accident that our lives of prayer
and worship are focused on giving thanks, especially for we who are blessed
with this rich Anglican tradition of ours.
Every Sunday, in fact, we celebrate Thanksgiving. You may have missed it, in the same way a
fish doesn’t notice the water in which it’s swimming. But every Sunday, and right here this
morning, we gather at God’s altar to celebrate Thanksgiving. It even says so in the Prayer Book, both in
English and in Greek. This is a
congregational-participation sermon, so please get out your prayer book and
turn to page 361. Look about a third of
the way down the page, where we begin to offer the prayers that invite Jesus to
come into our midst in the bread and wine of Holy Communion. There, you’ll see the title of this section
of the service: “The Great
Thanksgiving.” The priest says, “Let us
give thanks to the Lord our God,” and the people respond (go ahead, respond):
“It is right to give him thanks and praise.”
And the priest continues, saying, “It is right, and a good and joyful
thing, always and everywhere to give
thanks to you….” Every Sunday, we celebrate
this Great Thanksgiving, and we offer it as the centerpiece of the larger service
of Holy Eucharist. That’s the Greek word
I mentioned before, eucharist. Know what it means? That’s right – thanksgiving.

Of course, there are many ways we each
fall short, every day. Like the people
of Israel, we aren’t always so good at keeping God’s commandments, ordinances,
and statutes, which is why we offer a confession most Sundays, in addition to
our thanksgiving. But I believe God
isn’t looking for perfection from us. I
believe God is looking for us to be continually formed as followers and
witnesses of Jesus Christ. And a huge
part of that formation is the spiritual practice of simply saying
thank-you. Saying thank-you to God
10,000 times may not make us experts in being followers and witnesses of Jesus
Christ. But I’d say it’s a pretty darned
good start.

So, here’s your Thanksgiving challenge: As you begin each day, and as your end each
day, make it a practice to say thank-you to the source of your being and your
blessing, the source of light and life.
Our Anglican tradition has recognized the helpfulness of that daily practice
by giving us the gift of the services of Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer,
which I would certainly commend to your use.
But even if you’re not ready for that quite yet, let me recommend to you
one piece from Morning and Evening Prayer.
It’s called the General Thanksgiving, and it’s a treasure for the way
its language both delights our ears and shapes our hearts. I told you this was a congregational-participation
sermon, so let’s finish it up by offering together the General Thanksgiving,
found on page 101 of the prayer book:

Thank you, Steve, for that compelling witness
about your stewardship journey. You know,
in seminary, when they teach you about talking with a congregation about the
annual pledge campaign, the experts typically wouldn’t suggest that you do that
on the Sunday following a horrifying church shooting. But you know, that’s the world in which we live
now. For many of us, especially those of
a certain age, we remember fondly a time when the church doors were left
unlocked 24 hours a day so that neighbors could come in and pray. In my church growing up, Christ Episcopal in
Springfield, I remember where I was standing, as an acolyte ready for the
procession to begin, when the service was delayed because of a problem in the
chapel, which you entered by an exterior door.
It turned out that one man had killed another there, and the priest had
to go administer last rites before presiding at the Eucharist. That was 40 years ago, and the doors have been
locked at night ever since – even in Springfield.

Nostalgia makes us long for the “good old
days,” whenever we might locate that time in our minds – a time when mass
shootings were something we couldn’t fathom rather than something we struggle to
prevent. But last Sunday’s shooting
during worship in Sutherland Springs, Texas, jolts us right back to the present
moment.

When we see violence like that, it’s
tempting to go down some dangerous roads.
We might begin to see threats everywhere we look and wonder whether we
should even walk down the Trolley Trail or take kids to the park. We might begin to believe we must take
matters into our own hands and be ready to drop an active shooter wherever we
might be … even at Jesus’ altar. We
might even begin to believe the two most pernicious lies the world tells us –
that we are hopeless and that we are alone.
When we begin to believe those lies, the powers and principalities of
darkness win.

I cast it in those terms intentionally
because, as we look back on our past as followers of Jesus Christ, we notice
that the apostle Paul found himself in a world just as threatening as ours,
albeit for very different reasons. Paul
lived as a Jew, an ethnic and religious minority surviving at the whim of the
Roman Empire, which taxed the living daylights out of its subjugated peoples
and executed their leaders, like a certain Jesus of Nazareth, when they began
saying challenging things. But the danger
came from the other side, too: Paul and his Christian communities also endured
persecution from the Jewish authorities, who saw this Jesus movement as a
threat to their authority and power.

In Paul’s world view, the conflicts he and
his communities faced were reflections of cosmic struggles taking place in a
realm we can’t see. Violence and
persecution were the consequence of standing on the side of God’s realm of
light and life, which Paul believed was battling and triumphing over the powers
of darkness and death. Jesus’
resurrection and his reign as Lord were the decisive blows against the powers that
wield “hardship or distress or persecution or … peril or sword” (Romans
8:35). From Paul’s perspective, the
struggles he and his communities faced were part of a mopping-up action that
would soon be brought to its fulfillment when Jesus returned in glory – which
Paul expected to happen any day.

So, writing to the Christians in
Thessalonica, Paul urges them to remember where they stand in this cosmic conflict. “We do not want you to … grieve as others do
who have no hope,” he writes. “For just
as Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him
those who have died. … For the Lord
himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and the sound of
God’s trumpet, [the Lord] will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will
rise. … Then we who are alive … will
meet the Lord … and be with the Lord forever.” (4:13-16) When Paul writes about the “coming of the
Lord” (4:15), he’s using a technical term in Greek for a state visit by the
emperor,1 so he’s making a very clear statement about who’s really
in charge – and it’s not the emperor. Despite the struggles of the moment, Paul
says, do not join those “who have no hope” (4:13). “Encourage one another” instead (4:18).

Of course, the “principalities” and “powers”
(Ephesians 6:12 KJV) look different in their presentation now. Today the “hardship and distress” comes to us
in a litany of shootings: Sutherland Springs and Las Vegas and Charleston and
Orlando and San Bernadino and Virginia Tech and Killeen and Aurora and
Columbine and Sandy Hook Elementary. And
we feel a growing sense of impotence to stop such madness, getting caught on
the horns of a dilemma between gun control and constitutional rights, rather
than seeing gun violence as a public-health crisis, one every bit as serious as
tuberculosis or polio were, and just as much within our capacity to
address. Instead, we see hardness of
heart defeating the common good. But if
the apostle Paul were standing in this pulpit today, I think he would tell us
the response of the Christian community remains the same. When the powers and principalities of the
world threaten us, choose against
them. Choose community and hope over isolation
and fear.

What does that look like? I read an interesting post from my seminary
this week. The writer was struggling with just these questions – when 26 people
die going to church, how in the world can people of faith respond in a
meaningful way? But the post noted that
“when violence intrudes into the places we thought were safe, one thing that
can make a huge difference is knowing we’re not alone,”2 a reality
we embody by reaching out rather than drawing in. We stand with Christians across the centuries,
and stand against the power of violence, when we make the choice to stand
together: when we grieve deep loss, when we gather to pray, when we visit
someone who’s sick, when we cook for a friend, when we work for social change, when
we act to help light overcome the darkness. The impact of these actions may seem tiny
compared with the impact of hundreds of bullets. But I think Paul would tell us to “encourage
one another with these words” and actions “so that you may not grieve as others
do who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:18,13).

And though it may sound self-serving to
say this, I will say it anyway because I believe it to be true: We also take a stand for light overcoming
darkness when we build the capacity of a church family to be light in the
darkness. Yes, we are in an annual pledge
campaign, and I would want you to fill out a pledge card in any case. I would want you to be on that journey Steve
talked about, taking the next step in a spiritual practice of giving, seeing your
giving as a connecting point with God potentially just as strong as the prayers
you offer in bed each night or the meal you serve to a person who’s hungry. Those things would always be true. And,
in the midst of the darkness we see around us, I ask you to turn in a pledge
card as an act of solidarity and an emblem of hope. Making a pledge, you put on the “whole armor
of God” (Ephesians 6:13) – the belt of truth, the shield of faith, the
breastplate of righteousness, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the
Spirit of love. Making a pledge, you
“equip the saints for the work of ministry [and build] up the body of Christ”
(Ephesians 4:12), within this church family and for the world. Making a pledge, you choose hope over
fear. And right now, there is nothing
your heart, or the world, needs more.

Today, we’re marking All Saints’ Sunday –
a time we celebrate the countless faithful people who’ve loved God and loved
their neighbors in this first chapter of eternal life. A little later, we’ll remember those we’ve
buried from St. Andrew’s since last All Saints’ Sunday, giving thanks for the
witness of their lives and rejoicing that those lives continue in God’s
heavenly country.

And today, in what may seem like an odd
juxtaposition, we also celebrate the sacrament of baptism, welcoming a new
child of God into the family, Ella Rose Mitchell. It’s not just the circle of life we’re
remembering with this. The deeper, and
deeply unlikely, truth is this: As
baptized people, you and I share the same call as the saints who’ve gone
before, as well as the same promise of eternal blessing. This day is about all the saints – including the one sitting next to you and the one
you see in the mirror.

That reality may be hard to accept. But the Feast of All Saints is here to tell us
the truth that our lives are more than what we see, day to day. We got a beautiful glimpse of that reality
from our readings this morning – the end game, what our faith and practice as
followers of Jesus is leading us toward.
In this life, what saints experience can feel like dubious blessing – being
broken in spirit, hungering for righteousness, practicing mercy, being pure in
heart, struggling to make peace, even enduring others’ ridicule and
disdain. But that dubious blessedness
will come to its fullness in a future chapter of eternal life, when we “hunger
no more and thirst no more” as God guides us to “springs of the water of life”
and “wipe[s] away every tear from our eyes” (Revelation 7:16-17). We are ever walking a bridge between who we
are and who we will be, in the fullness of God’s time – and in so doing, we
have the opportunity, as saints, to evoke heaven among us and point others
toward it.

Every Sunday, even every day for many of
us, we offer a prayer whose implications ought to make us stop short: We pray, “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.” It’s a
beautiful petition, but I wish the Gospel writers had used active voice in
remembering Jesus’ words in the second clause.
“Thy will be done” … OK, by whom?
Who is it we’re imagining doing God’s will to bring about the kingdom,
God’s beloved community, here on earth as it is in heaven? Now it’s time to look in the mirror once again,
because the answer will be staring you in the face.

So, how do we saints do that? What is God’s will, and what does it look
like for us to do it on earth, as it is in heaven?

Of course, the promises of the baptismal
covenant flesh out our call, and we’ll renew that covenant again this
morning. But what ties those promises
together? What’s the bottom line? Well, it’s the Great Commandment, of course –
to love God with all our heart and soul and mind strength, and to love our neighbors
as ourselves. But given the way we use
the word “love,” we can quickly hear that as a command to feel a certain way about God and our neighbors. That’s not it. Maybe it’s just my bias, but I don’t think
God is nearly as interested in how we feel as in what we do. Loving God and neighbor is about building
relationships. That’s the work of a
saint, including the one you see in the mirror.

So, I want to tell you about some saintly relationship-building
that’s happening around here. You can
see it in the work of our Vestry leaders, staff, and clergy. You saw an example last week, as the
Endowment Commission sponsored coffee hour and invited you to join the Legacy
Society – just one of many commissions and groups setting up shop in the Jewell
Room to help you to get involved. Staff
and parishioners have been reaching out to parents of our youth to invite them
into the fun of youth ministry. Deacon
Bruce, Elaine Crider and I did a series of trainings for lay pastoral-care
givers, to get more of us actively into the work of loving one another. Mtr. Ezgi is inviting younger adults and
parents into Bible study, or a young-adults group, or gatherings for recently
married couples and baptismal parents.
We’ve brought back Holy Happy Hour, as well as the Happy Hour
Concerts.

And soon, you’ll receive an invitation to
take a parish survey. Part of that effort
is about keeping the database as clean and useful as possible. But many of the questions ask you to share
feedback and think about how you might like to get engaged in something fun and
meaningful. I hope that, from the
information we get back, we can put together several groups of people with
similar interests and affiliations – dinner groups, or movie groups, or book
groups, or (our collective personal favorite) wine-tasting groups. The point is to help us do the work of
saints, which is building relationships.

You can also see St. Andrew’s saints
building relationships through the service they offer. I am deeply tempted to start calling out
specific people, but I also know I’d leave out more saints than I could
name. But just a few collective
examples: How about the ladies of Simply
Divine? As you know, Simply Divine will
be closing soon; the last hurrah (and final sale) is next weekend. In the shop’s decades-long run, the Simply
Divine ladies have created a fun and welcoming space for parishioners to come together,
and they’ve strengthened many community ministries with thousands of dollars in
grants each year. And all of that came
from the hearts and hands of ladies who’ve been willing to give of themselves
for the kingdom’s work, and I appreciate them very much. Here’s another example: the choir, who
offered that amazing Bach Cantata last weekend.
You can’t imagine the hours of service they give to help us grow closer
to God, but they also build community together as they do it. How about the
members of the Outreach Commission and the parishioners who come out to throw
parties for moms and kids at Rose Brooks, or work with kids at local schools,
or provide warm clothes for hundreds of people at the Free Store, or build
relationships with our partners in Haiti?
All of that is kingdom work, building beloved community among our own
family and with the world.

And then, there are the dollars that help make
relationship-building possible. Coming
together for worship takes lights and heat and bulletins, not to mention Saint
Robert Tillman and Saint Mary Sanders, here nearly every Sunday to meet your
needs. In addition, hosting book studies
and prayer groups and meetings and community organizations takes a building
that keeps the heat in and the water out.
You all know it takes dollars to fund the people and the infrastructure
for ministry here. And I want to tell you
about the giving of a few saints whose examples inspire me.

I know staff members who give to the
church that pays them, because they believe in the work we’re doing and because
they love the people who are doing it.

I know one parishioner who began this year
offering a generous pledge, more than mine, certainly. For next year, it’s quadrupled. The church has made a difference in this
person’s life, and now this person will make a huge difference in our ability
to bring more people together.

And I want to share with you something
about our Vestry members. This year,
every Vestry member had a pledge turned in within the first couple of weeks of
the pledge campaign. That’s servant
leadership – and it doesn’t stop there.
I asked the Vestry members if they would let me know whether they
practiced tithing, giving 10 percent of their income toward God’s work in the
world. Five Vestry members are at or
beyond that point in enabling God’s will to be done on earth as it is in
heaven.

You don’t have to be there yet. Not many of us are, honestly, but that’s
OK. It starts with making a pledge.

Actually, I guess there’s a step even before that:
Walk into the Narthex after worship today
and simply let someone take a quick Polaroid shot of you to put up on the door
to the parking lot.That door is a
growing icon of the company of saints in this place, the household of God into
which we enter in baptism, the family of God we know as St. Andrew’s.As our reading this morning puts it, “See
what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God;
and that is what we are” (1 John 3:1). From our newest saint this morning,
little Ella Rose, to those of you who’ve been here across the decades, we are
God’s family in this place, trying to do the will of our heavenly parent, which
is to love, with flesh and bones on it. We
are St. Andrew’s, and we are here to build relationships, one saint at a
time.And as the Feast of All Saints
reminds us, every saint matters.There
is no “us” without you.

Sunday, October 29, 2017

Sermon for the 500th Anniversary of the Protestant Reformation
Oct. 29, 2017

Today, we’re celebrating the 500th
anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. The famous date is actually October
31, 1517, when Martin Luther posted his 95 theses against Church practices of
his day. It’s not entirely clear whether
he nailed those 95 theses to the door of Wittenburg Castle or the door of All
Saints’ Church in Wittenburg; or whether he never nailed them to anything but
simply sent them to his archbishop in Mainz and published them to others.

In any event, Luther was protesting the
selling of indulgences, which theologically were said to shorten a sinner’s
time in purgatory and practically raised a lot of money for the institutional
Church. The deeper issues were about
sin, redemption, and religious authority.
For Luther and the later Protestant reformers, we are justified by faith
in God’s grace alone, not by good works.
Scripture, rather than Church tradition, is the source of divine
revelation. And all baptized people have
direct access to God’s grace because they’re part of the priesthood of all
believers.

Luther’s protest focused a movement that
had been building for years before and would continue for years after. What we call the Reformation had been coming
since 1378, when the Western Church was torn by schism and three would-be popes
claimed the title. The movement picked
up steam in 1414, when Jan Hus was burned at the stake for condemning the sales
of indulgences and for arguing the papacy was a human institution – and then, a
year later, when John Wycliffe was declared a heretic for translating the
Scriptures into English and for criticizing the clergy’s pomp and privilege. And the movement would grow beyond Luther’s
95 theses to include the work of others, especially John Calvin, from whom would
come the Reformed tradition, including what we know as the Presbyterian
Church. Like Jan Huss and John Wycliffe,
Luther and Calvin believed in the power of grace alone to bridge the gap
between sinful humanity and the righteous God who loves us; and they believed
that people must be able to hear and read God’s Word, and offer the gift of
worship, in their own languages. The
reformers also took the movement in different and competing directions. There’s an old joke that “divisiveness was
Protestantism’s greatest gift to Christianity,”1 and sadly there’s truth
to that. Certainly, without the
Reformation, the religious shopping mall we know as denominations simply
wouldn’t exist.

The Reformation opened a couple of other
huge doors to the future, too. One was
the question of authority. Where do we
look for truth, in church matters and in everything else? If three politically motivated bishops can
each claim to be the true pope; and if reforming priests can start pointing out
the Church’s corruption; and if printing presses can mass-produce new ideas; and
if scientists can observe that the earth actually revolves around the sun, not
the other way around; and if different churches can read the same Biblical
texts and find different meanings in them – if there is no longer a consensus
about who holds the truth, then to whom should we listen? Where does authority lie?2

The answer came from the other door to the
future opened wide by the Reformation: the
power of individualism. Luther came to
see that, just as salvation didn’t come from following Jewish Law, it doesn’t
come from following the rules of Church tradition, either. Salvation comes from recognizing that I
“have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23), and only faith
in Jesus Christ heals my sinfulness and lets me share in God’s
righteousness. Well, if that’s true – if
my salvation depends on my faith in Jesus Christ – and if books can now be
produced with machines rather than parchment and pen, then I need a Bible in my
home; and my children need to learn to read so they can get right with God, too. And if Luther was right about the priesthood
of all believers, then I don’t need a priest or a church hierarchy to do the
work of reconciling me with God. I can
do that myself. And if there are
multiple ways of worshiping God, then I have the power to choose which one is
right for me. With the Reformation, it
became the individual’s faith that
mattered … and, ultimately, the individual who chose which path of truth to
take.3

So, you may be wondering, why are a bunch
of Episcopalians celebrating all this? If you know your Anglican history, you know
that we are a tradition of the Reformation, too; but we took a different path
that led to a different place. For us,
the break with Rome came first, followed by the theological reflection – and
bloodshed – of reform. It’s important
that the name of our vehicle of reformation is the Church of England, rather
than the “Henry-ites” or the “Cranmer-ites.”
We’re named for a nation, not an individual, because for us the break
with Rome was about power and sovereignty first, theology second. But reformation did happen in England, too:
worship in the people’s language, administration of both bread and wine to the
congregation, and an ongoing argument about just how reformed our worship
should be. The vestments we’re wearing
today illustrate what Anglican clergy would have been wearing in the mid-1500s
– and over the years, there were great arguments about how “popish” our vesture
and liturgical practice should be. The
more Protestant among us thought even a white surplice was too much, arguing
for no vesture at all and no ornamentation at the altar. It wasn’t until the Oxford Movement in the
1800s that stoles and chasubles, vesture from the early and medieval Church,
began to make a return.

We Episcopalians and other Anglicans
around the world see ourselves as “catholic and
reformed.” We are part of Christ’s
universal Church, in succession with centuries of tradition that’s come before
us, proclaiming the ancient creeds, centered in sacramental practice. And at the same time, we’re reformed –
reliant on God’s grace alone, knowing God as revealed in Scripture, and living
out the priesthood of all believers. Our
Book of Common Prayer unites these
paths, focusing us on the sacraments, calling us back to the Creeds, giving us
Scripture for daily and weekly hearing, and empowering lay people as the
primary ministers of the Church. The
catechism tells us the orders of ministry are lay people, bishops, priests, and deacons (BCP 855); and the order of
the orders matters.

So, there you have it: catholic and reformed, finding our authority in
Scripture, and tradition, and reason; reveling in the mystery that “both/and”
can be true. That’s the Anglican via media, the middle way – a good, if
messy, path to walk.

So, what do we do with all this history,
as we celebrate the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s protest
movement? Here are two primary
take-aways from the Reformation for me. The
first is our call to the holiness of humility as broken individuals and as a
broken Church, both in need of God’s grace.
“Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,” said the Son of God, “for I
am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls” (Matthew
11:29). Follow my way, says God’s
Incarnate Word – made flesh in a dirty stable, living among the poor and
oppressed, dying the worst death imaginable.
The way of the cross is the only way Jesus calls his Church to take, in
Luther’s day and in our own. The Church
needs humility perhaps more than anything else, especially in an age when
people have embraced the gospel of the individual to such a degree that there
is no common narrative, just the truth of my own story. But the real truth is, people need a bigger
story, even if they don’t realize it; and the Church has that story to offer,
if it can do so with clarity and humility rather than entitlement and judgment. Good News from a humble heart is the very
best news there is.

Here’s the other take-away I see for us in
the Reformation. If humility is our call
when we look in the mirror, and when we look at our Church, and when we look at
our society, then the other side of Jesus’ call is to acknowledge where power
and glory truly lie. Power and glory
abide with the God who stoops down in an act of divine humility to share power
and glory with even such as us. To those
who have faith in Jesus and who
aspire to the faith of Jesus (Romans
3:26), that divine glory is in sight, if we can get ourselves out of the way
long enough to look for it.

In fact, in just a few minutes, we’ll hear
from a mighty apostle of that deep truth, one who certainly could have reveled
in his own talent. Johann Sebastian Bach
is arguably the greatest composer in Western history; at one point in his life,
he was cranking out a cantata a week
of the kind of quality we’re about to hear.4 But Bach also attended the same school Martin Luther
attended as a boy; Bach served in and composed for Lutheran churches all his
life; and he had all of Martin Luther’s writings on his library shelves. So, it’s no great surprise that, at the end
of his magnificent manuscripts, Bach did not simply sign his name or his
initials. He also wrote the initials S.D.G., which stand for Soli Deo Gloria – “to God alone be the glory.”5

It is perfect, I think, that we celebrate
the Protestant Reformation, and our own ongoing need for reform, by hearing
Luther’s words set to Bach’s music. Together,
they bring us the complementary truths of the holiness of human humility and
the glory of God’s grace. To bring those
truths together, let me leave you with Luther’s words; you’ll have Bach’s tune
in your head soon enough:

As we gather this morning to celebrate St.
Francis and bless our pets, I’m going to confess a sin to you, a sin for which
all you good dog owners can hold me in contempt. I bless my dog, Petey, with
cheeseburgers. Petey seems to have quite
a fondness for cheeseburgers, and I have erred and strayed in my ways by
getting into the habit of bringing him one when I stop by McDonald’s to get
something for myself. We stand there in our
kitchen, and I tell Petey he needs to sit and calm down, which he sort of
manages to do; and then I give him his heart’s desire. We do this bite by bite until that disc of
greasy, cheesy goodness is gone. Forgive
me, for I am a bad doggie daddy, blessing Petey with cheeseburgers.

I have a much better example of dog blessing
that comes from another member of my family. When we first moved here, we got a
Lab–Golden Retriever mix named Jenny.
Jenny was many times Petey’s size but also many times humbler. Petey, in fact, isn’t here this morning to
get a blessing because he doesn’t work and play so well with other dogs. Jenny, on the other hand, was the ultimate
good dog, both among other canines and with us, her pack. She wanted nothing more than simply to be
with you, regardless of whether you had a cheeseburger in your hand. And so our son, Dan, got into the habit, as a
boy, of getting down on the floor with Jenny and lying there with her to watch
TV or a movie. I imagine it was the best
thing ever for Jenny, having one of the people of her pack bless her with that
kind of presence, stooping down to inhabit her world.

I don’t know whether St. Francis ever had
a dog, but I’ll bet Francis would have understood what my son, Dan, was up
to. Francis of Assisi is maybe the
ultimate model in Christian tradition of embracing a life of stooping
down. Some of you know his story.1 Francis was the son of a wealthy cloth
merchant in Italy, born in the late 1100s.
In his early years, he lived into the very worst you might expect from
the spoiled child of a wealthy family – entitled, wasteful, drunken,
arrogant. Francis got the chance to play
soldier and go off to war against another Italian city-state, so he spent a lot
of his father’s money to buy a horse and fine armor. He was taken prisoner, as it turned out, and
spent a year waiting for his father to ransom him. He went back to his unsavory lifestyle until
he got the chance to play soldier again, this time leaving as a knight for the
Fourth Crusade.

But, you know, sometimes – all the time,
actually – God chooses the last person you’d expect and inspires that person to
change. A day’s ride out of Assisi, Francis
heard God calling him to turn back home.
It must have been quite a persuasive encounter, because the arrogant
man-child actually did go back home.
Again, he resumed his old lifestyle, but he also kept listening to God,
who apparently also kept knocking.
Francis began to see that his life wasn’t just shallow but contrary to
the call he’d heard from Jesus in the Gospels.
And one day, Francis encountered a leper – a broken, impoverished,
smelly man with an awful, contagious skin condition. The leper was the antithesis of everything
Francis had valued – fine clothes, fine food, beauty, power, strength, wealth,
all that. But Francis stooped down from
his horse and greeted the leper with the kiss of peace. Contrary to everything he knew, Francis found
joy in greeting that leper. And it sent
him even further along his journey.

Francis then heard God calling to him,
saying, “Francis, rebuild my church.” He
thought the instruction was literal – that he was supposed to rebuild a local broken-down
chapel. So Francis took some of his
father’s stock of fine cloth and sold it to pay for the repairs. His father had had enough; he dragged Francis
before the local bishop, demanding that Francis return his money and renounce
his rights as heir. Francis took it one
step further. He stripped off his fine
clothes, tossed them before his father, and renounced his connection to his
family, acknowledging God as his only Father.
Then Francis left with literally nothing to begin a life of wandering
service to people he would meet and preaching about following God’s call to
love.

Before long, others saw Francis’ joy in
the freedom he’d found, and they joined him.
Francis organized his companions’ life around a simple rule of giving
away their possessions, keeping nothing as they proclaimed the kingdom of God,
and taking up the cross daily – serving the people they encountered in acts of
self-sacrificing love. Francis and his
group lived the Gospel literally. They
had nothing but the joy that comes with the perfect freedom of being bound by
nothing but God’s command. They lived
Jesus’ model and his teachings. The
story is told that a thief stole the hood of one of the brothers, and Francis
made the brother chase after the thief to offer him his cloak as well. Against all the world’s expectations, this
movement caught on, with thousands following Francis’ model. Eventually, he had to organize them, and the
Franciscan Order was born.

Francis was all about stooping into love –
which, after all, is God’s practice with us.
The Psalms say that God “stoops to behold the heavens and the earth,”
taking “the weak up out of the dust and lift[ing] the poor from the ashes”
(Psalm 113:5-6, BCP). Jesus lived that out ultimately, God
incarnate born among the animals and crying in the dirty straw; the Son of God
who, like the birds of the air, had no place to lay his head. When Jesus identifies who is blessed in God’s
eyes, it’s not the people whose lives seem to reveal blessing. It’s the poor who receive the kingdom of
heaven, the meek who inherit the earth.
All of what we seek and value is window dressing at best.

There seems to be a pattern here. To practice love, both God and Francis
stooped down, renouncing power and possession, status and privilege. If that was true for God and Francis, it’s
probably true for us: We have things we need to lose in order to love as Christ
loves us.

Like what?
Well, there are the usual targets, of course, things Francis certainly
would witness against: Consumerism, waste,
and pollution that harm God’s creation. The
love of money, which “is a root of all kinds of evil and … many pains,” as the
apostle Paul wrote (1 Timothy 6:10). But
this week, as we reel from the news of yet another mass shooting, it’s violence
that weighs on my heart.

In our society, violence is a commodity,
whether it’s real or entertainment. And
as long as violence is profitable, we’ll keep pursuing it. Here’s my second confession for the morning: I
choose to watch violent movies sometimes; there is something in them that seems
real and raw and exciting. And at the
movie theaters, I see people there with small children … because, you know, the
violence isn’t real, not like a mass shooting – it’s only a movie. Well, I don’t think you have to be a social
scientist to see a connection: If violence seems normal, then violence becomes
normalized. Whether you’re talking about
movies or firearms, the government isn’t going to ban something that’s both a
freedom in this nation and a source
of immense profit. We have to exercise our freedom to renounce violence, and its
instruments, for ourselves. And we have
to pray that God will make use of our small examples to transform other hearts,
too, working with our witness as we live and narrate the choices we make. That’s how love happens – from the bottom up. Love is an insurgency, not a legislative
mandate.

So, as God’s insurgent of love, what do you need to lose? What binds you and keeps you from stooping
low, into the experience of another? Like
my son’s example, as he got down on the floor with our old dog Jenny, it’s the
stooping low that blesses those whom God places in the intersecting points of
our lives. So, here’s my prayer for us this
St. Francis’ Sunday: May we be the
people our dogs think we are, and may we practice the holy downward mobility of
stooping low into the kingdom of God.